“Then, if you will bring the horses at once, we shall be ready when you return.”

In another instant he had vanished, as if afraid to trust the reality of his good fortune to the dangers of delay.  At the end of half an hour he reappeared, leading the two horses, himself mounted on a half-broken mustang.  A pair of large, jingling silver spurs and a stiff sombrero, borrowed with the mustang from some mysterious source, were donned to do honor to the occasion.

The young girls were not yet ready, but he was shown by the Chinese servant into the parlor to wait for them.  The decanter of whiskey and glasses were still invitingly there.  He was hot, trembling, and flushed with triumph.  He walked to the table and laid his hand on the decanter, when an odd thought flashed upon him.  He would not drink this time.  No, it should not be said that he, the selected escort of the elite of Devil’s Ford, had to fill himself up with whiskey before they started.  The boys might turn to each other in their astonishment, as he proudly passed with his fair companions, and say, “It’s Whiskey Dick,” but he’d be d——­d if they should add, “and full as ever.”  No, sir!  Nor when he was riding beside these real ladies, and leaning over them at some confidential moment, should they even know it from his breath!  No. . . .  Yet a thimbleful, taken straight, only a thimbleful, wouldn’t be much, and might help to pull him together.  He again reached his trembling hand for the decanter, hesitated, and then, turning his back upon it, resolutely walked to the open window.  Almost at the same instant he found himself face to face with Christie on the veranda.

She looked into his bloodshot eyes, and cast a swift glance at the decanter.

“Won’t you take something before you go?” she said sweetly.

“I—­reckon—­not, jest now,” stammered Whiskey Dick, with a heroic effort.

“You’re right,” said Christie.  “I see you are like me.  It’s too hot for anything fiery.  Come with me.”

She led him into the dining-room, and pouring out a glass of iced tea handed it to him.  Poor Dick was not prepared for this terrible culmination.  Whiskey Dick and iced tea!  But under pretence of seeing if it was properly flavored, Christie raised it to her own lips.

“Try it, to please me.”

He drained the goblet.

“Now, then,” said Christie gayly, “let’s find Jessie, and be off!”

CHAPTER V

Whatever might have been his other deficiencies as an escort, Whiskey Dick was a good horseman, and, in spite of his fractious brute, exhibited such skill and confidence as to at once satisfy the young girls of his value to them in the management of their own horses, to whom side-saddles were still an alarming novelty.  Jessie, who had probably already learned from her sister the purport of Dick’s confidences, had received him with equal cordiality and perhaps